Over the past ten years economic growth in Asia has contributed to a reduction of poverty as well as fertility rates, and greater prosperity has contributed to gains in life expectancy. However, at present many workers still work in informal employment, frequently for long hours at little pay and without social protection coverage. A growing demand for social support, extending the coverage of social protection benefits and improving the job quality of workers will be among Asia’s major challenges in future. This report considers these challenges, providing policy examples from countries to illustrate good practice, including Bangladesh, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Pakistan, Singapore and Viet Nam.

The OECD/Korea Policy Centre held its 11th Social Experts meeting in October 2016. This provided the Centre with an opportunity to look back at a decade of change in social expenditures and social policy development. It is impossible to detail all such change across Asia in a concise volume such as this, but the report intends to give a flavour of the most relevant changes in the socio-economic context (Chapter 1) and illustrates social protection spending trends and coverage issues in Chapter 2. Throughout, this document highlights good policy practice of countries whose delegates have regularly attended the social expert meetings in Seoul.

Over the past ten years, the socio-economic context in Asia has changed. Strong economic growth has contributed to a reduction of poverty and greater prosperity to reduced total fertility rates and increased life expectancy. Asia is increasing investment in education and its educational attainment is going up. Asia has to make the most of window of opportunity that an increasingly educated working-age population offers and prepare for the onset of population ageing in years to come.

Over the past ten years there has been a lot change in Asia. Economic growth has contributed to a reduction of poverty as well as fertility rates, and with greater prosperity have come gains in life expectancy. In turn, this is likely to generate even greater future change as population ageing will unfold at speed, and pose considerable challenges to social and economic policy development.

This chapter starts with setting out the scope of social expenditure and then summarises the prevalence of statutory social protection provisions across countries. The third section discusses issues around the extension the coverage of social protection benefits among elderly citizens considering pensions, non-contributory benefits as well as the Singaporean provident fund. Section 2.4 looks at the ADB’s Social Protection Indicator to glean some insight in the extent to which richer and poorer countries devote resources to social expenditure and whether or not they are able to reach potential beneficiaries. This discussion illustrates the importance of different components of social spending (e.g., social insurance, social assistance, and active labour market programmes); and, the poverty and gender dimensions of distributional impacts of social spending.